by a grievous sense that the too voluble tongue is every moment betraying a divine confidence. When once we are compelled to feel that there is nothing behind the audible voice, the visible eye, and the surface of experience exposed to view, all grave and trustful affection,— all the deeper homage of the heart,-is gone. All spiritual strength for ourselves, all noble ties to one another, have their real source in that inner sanctuary where God denies his lonely audience to none. Its secrets are holy; its asylum, inviolate; its consolations, sure; and all are open to the simple heart-word, "Thou art my hiding-place."

XVIII.

The Spiritual Charity of Christendom.

LUKE xiv. 21.

"Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, and the lame, and the blind."

So that nameless, perhaps imaginary "city" was already just like ours, and hid away its misery behind its splendour; and if you wanted to find its crowd of indigent and stricken, you had to dive into the lanes, and seek that you might save it. And, in the ancient cities, the quarters over which the needy or servile population spread were larger probably than in ours, and often the contrasts greater between their spacious mansions and their nests of poverty. Look at the map of old Athens, Corinth, or Rome: within the thin line that traces the walls run two or three converging roads, joining, like scanty islands in a sea of space, a temple, a courthouse, a gymnasium, a circus, a bath, a cluster of palaces; leaving blank enough to shade every slope as in the open country. What stood upon those vast areas which the engraver cannot fill ?-the forgotten

multitudes that leave no monument; who are born, and suffer, and die, without the notice of history; but who are, collectively, at every moment, the largest holders in the great fund of human existence. When I try to fill up these silent blanks with the tones and looks of their lost life, and think of their tragedies of grief and passion on which the curtain never falls; when I count the generations that inherit the woes of one metropolis; when I remember how many are the vanished cities of the world, and the sores of those that yet remain; I understand too well the deep pity of the saviours of humanity, and look with wondering reverence at their faith and hope rather than their charity.

One difference, however, there is between the ancient and the modern civilization, to which the ruins of Greek and Roman cities bear striking witness. As every great sentiment of the human mind shapes itself into expression in some form of art, it is fair to infer that a passion which has left no durable memorial,-which is neither heard in the song nor seen in the marble or the bronze, cannot have wielded any great power. In measuring the Art of a people, you find the proportions of their nature; for precisely here it is that the mind transcends the rule of mere utility, and works to the scale, not of any outward need, but of an inward affection that must come forth; and the deeper and more durable the feeling, the less perishable are the monuments it creates. What then are the remains which you can study in the

land of the Cæsars or the Ptolemies? The first obvious fact is, that the buildings devoted to the convenience of the body are for the most part gone; while those that represent ideas of the mind are standing yet. The provisions for shelter, the places of traffic, the treasuries of wealth, the home of domestic life, (except where preserved, as in Pompeii, beneath the ashes of a volcano,) have crumbled into the dust with the generations that filled them once. But the temple, answering to the sense of the Infinite and Holy; the rock-hewn sepulchre, where love and mystery blended into a twilight of surmise; the column or the bust of civic praise, grateful for service to the commonwealth ;these survive the shocks of war and the waste of centuries, and testify that religion, love, and honour for the good are inextinguishable.

But a second fact becomes obvious, the moment you imagine the same test applied to any great city of the modern world. Suppose the ages to have done their work on this metropolis, and buried all but its most durable remains; and walk over the site in fancy, to think what you would find. There are the same great monuments of our humanity, repeated still ;—the cathedral, where the living knelt by the stone figures of their fathers; the courts, dedicated to the just and right; the halls of legislation, for harmonizing the law and the conscience of the people; the marble records of genius and virtue, cut with the graver of a nation's

grief and pride; all these are there, to attest the sameness of our nature in every age. But in the midst of them you discover vestiges to which Greece and Rome present no parallel. "Here," your guide would say, "was a school for orphans,-there, a refuge for pensioned age; this enclosure was the retreat of the insane; to this theatre the workmen came to hear or read, when the day was over; and behind this portico was the infirmary for the cure of accident and disease." Here then we have a new sentiment,-of sympathy with defective and suffering humanity, which in heathendom has left, so far as I know, not one memorial of itself; and which now vies, in the solidity of its creations, with the most ancient passions of the soul. To conceive aright of the social condition of the old Pagan world, you must fancy all our institutions emptied of their inmates; must turn loose from the asylum the maniac and the idiot; cast forth the blind and dumb upon the public ways; throw from the hospitals the fevered and the fractured, on the chance of care in the cabin of the slave; and you must think of this, not as it would be now in a land where the private sympathies are alive which have called up public institutions, but on a soil so barren of the charities as to have bequeathed no enduring trace of their existence.

And as there are no monuments of the humanities from the old world, so neither does its history present the peculiar type of character which is moulded by their

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